So when is a large market share a bad thing? Well it is bad when there is a defect in manufacture. You see Apple has a vast amount of iPods and iPhones out in the wild. This means nice sales numbers for them and great revenue for their carrier partners but it means bad news for consumers.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let’s say that Apple has 20,000,000 iPod touches in the wild and 10,000 are defective. that is less than .05% a percent of the iPods on the market. But it is still 10,000 people that are having an issue. Even at 1,000,000 that is only 5% of the iPods out in our theoretical market here.

This is why Apple can sit back and call the overheating and exploding batteries isolated. They are using simple math to show that despite the increasing number they represent a small percentage of the number of units out in the market. However the issue is still very real and represents a safety issue that Apple should not be allowed to ignore.

Thankfully, in the EU at least, Apple is being forced to investigate the source of these problems. Apple so far is cooperating, but that does not mean they are actually going to do anything about the problem. You see the core issue is the Apple secrecy and xenophobic nature. When there is a problem they will not acknowledge it. Instead they try to maintain the illusion of superior hardware and products.

Apple hangs onto this persona like nothing else. This is despite having their products assembled by the same OEM that other companies use and having many of the same third party parts. Apple products can’t be defective, at least that is what they tell you. They talk about their reliability rating compared to Dell, Gateway, and the rest of the PC world when some of their products are made in the same factory.

It gets even worse if you know where some of the Apple parts are assembled. For instance, on paper Apple orders its products from Foxconn or Pegatron [OEM/ODM manufacturing arm of ASUS], but back in 2007, BSN’s Editor-in-Chief went to "Golden Dragon" Factory in mainland China – the factory completely unrelated to ASUS or Foxconn – and saw white MacBooks [yes, the same ones that had numerous issues] being assembled right next to assembly line where Lenovo consumer notebooks were being assembled. Upon asking how come that the Macbooks are made in that Fab, the answer was that the Company X [we’ll let you guess which one of the afore mentioned ones] ran out of manufacturing capacity, and outsourced the production of white MacBooks to a 3rd company. Thus, the chain looked like this: Apple orders the part from OEM1 who then outsources to OEM2 who then manufactures and QA all the parts and ships them to OEM1 who will then ship the parts to Apple. Now, don’t tell us that there isn’t a lot of room for error in these inter-steps.

It just does not make sense if you look at it in a logical manner. Does Apple make a good product? Yes they do, are they perfect? Absolutely not. They are subject to the same defects in design and manufacture that any company is. Apple is not somehow magically immune to this.

It is time for Apple to end the pretense and begin to acknowledge the consumers that buy their products. To fully support them and not treat them like mindless drones. At the end of the day, in western world, every company that sells products has to offer warranty on the parts they sell. If they don’t, they usually either get slapped hard with the fine, with the ultimate penalty of being banned from selling. For instance, try buying Primco CD/DVD media in the European Union.

For us, it just doesn’t make any sense that Apple would sacrifice all the market share the company has for saving profit margin on 0.01% of all units sold.